Raise climate awareness in your business

Employees need to understand why climate action is important and how your company is participating. Start by sharing your climate plan with them along with concrete examples and initiatives. Then, regularly keep employees informed on your progress and share success stories to stay on track. Regularly seek your employees’ feedback.

Don’t forget that change usually comes with resistance. But if you have a clear climate plan, you will also become more attractive to new employees who want to work for a company with environmental values.

Find climate champions who will lead by example and help build momentum. These employees can be your eyes and ears on the ground and help you find improvements or tweaks to make. They can also respond to climate-related concerns of colleagues and offer ideas of actions to undertake. For example, if you are switching to electric trucks or retrofitting your building, your climate champions could help ease the transition period by advocating for the change to the rest of your team.

Further raise awareness by providing resources on best practices for reducing GHG emissions at work and home. If you can, hire a climate expert or reach out to non-profits to guide awareness raising efforts and training on making your activities more carbon neutral.

A campaign is a fun way to raise awareness and rally employees to your goals. Your climate champions can also participate in designing the campaign—organizing events, holding contests, and sharing success stories and progress updates. Even if you don’t have a big project coming up, you can hold a contest for the best idea for saving energy or share stories about employees who switched to transit or cycling to commute.

You can use SMART environmental sustainability related objectives as part of your performance management system for managers and frontline employees to further raise awareness of the importance of these issues. To do this fairly, you will need to set achievable targets and then measure your progress over time. Create a climate action plan with a manageable list of projects and a realistic timeline to get your team involved.